Broken Moon

by Catherine Vale

  “What do you want with me,” he said raggedly, his golden eyes blazing with hatred as he stared into the camera.

  “Oh, nothing much,” Amelia said nonchalantly. “Just to run a few simple experiments. Break your mind. Convince you to come and work for us.” A door swung open at the end of the hall, and a chill ran through Harley’s veins at the sound of footsteps ringing against the concrete floor.

  “Experiments?” he asked. “Is that what you’ve been doing with the shifters you’ve been taking off the street?”

  Amelia’s low chuckle in response told him his guess had been correct – that she had been behind the kidnappings. “As a matter of fact, yes,” she told him as a group of burly, uniformed men stopped outside his cell door. Keys jangled, and Chase assumed a crouching position, his muscles rippling as he began to shift. “We started with them because they were easier to capture, but civilians are only so useful to our operation. They’re more fragile and much less disciplined. So we devised a ploy in order to flush one of your Order out, and I must say it worked perfectly.”

  Harley was hardly listening now; he was pouring all his concentration into accelerating the shift. Muscles stretched and rotated and reformed; skin and claws and teeth lengthened, hair sprouted and bones shifted and realigned, sending a million pain signals sparking through his body. The door swung open, and he sprang for the throat of the first man who entered, his maw gaping.

  The bastard raised his gun and shot Harley in the chest before he made contact. Harley collapsed to the floor as the drug swept through his system, stealing the life from his limbs once more. He dimly heard the guard barking orders to the other men, and then he was being bound and lifted onto some kind of stretcher device.

  “What a shame that you’ve resisted,” Amelia’s voice echoed through the speakers again, dark with displeasure. “Now I’m going to have to wait for you to wake up again so I can have you punished…”

  Her voice faded into the darkness.

  Chapter Three

  Icy cold water struck Harley’s face, and he woke up sputtering and blinking. Bright light shone harshly in his eyes from a spotlight above, and he turned his head to the side only to see a bank of machines to his right, with wires snaking out of them.

  Looking down, he saw that he was strapped to a long metal table, and that there were several tubes sticking out of various sections of his body.

  “Ah, good. You’re awake. Finally.” Amelia was sitting atop a wooden desk several feet from the foot of Harley’s table. Dressed in a grey skirt-suit, with her hair pulled into a bun and a pair of glasses perched on her nose, she more resembled a school teacher than the vixen who’d seduced him into the alley. Her dark eyes gleamed as they roamed over his body, which was completely naked save for his boxer briefs, which they allowed him to keep. “You’re a fine specimen,” she breathed.

  “What the fuck do you want with me,” Harley rasped, his throat like sandpaper. What he wouldn’t give for a glass of water right now.

  Amelia lifted an eyebrow. “You’ll find out soon enough.” She lifted a hand and two men stepped into view, previously hidden behind the glare of the spotlight. They were dressed in scrubs and caps, their faces hidden behind surgical masks, but their eyes were stone cold as they approached a metal table filled with a hodge-podge of medical instruments, some of which looked suspiciously like torture devices.

  This only made Harley lift his chin. “Whatever you want to know, you’re not going to get it out of me by torturing me,” he said defiantly. “I’ve been there and done that already, and I’ve never broken.”

  “Oh, I didn’t bring you here to get information out of you,” Amelia laughed, then walked around the edge of the table, walking her fingers up the length of his body along the way. A shiver of revulsion crawled up Harley’s spine as her fingers walked up his chin and she tugged on his lower lip with her index finger. “I’ve already got some of our best hackers working on extracting information out of your files.” She slid her hand down his body and gently cupped his balls through his underwear, leaning down to whisper in his ear. “I’m here to test you now, to see just how far I can push the limits of your beautiful body.”

  The words were meant to be seductive, but they only flooded his veins with ice. “Your scent… it’s changed,” he rasped, registering that there was nothing left of that dark, heady sweetness that had made his head swim and his loins burst into flames.

  Amelia gave a tinkling laugh. “It’s amazing what a combination of the right pheromones can do for a girl, don’t you think?” she said, and then stepped back. “Just a few spritzes of that stuff on my neck and I had you eating out of the palm of my hand before you said a single word.” An ugly expression crossed her face as her grip tightened painfully on his balls, and Harley cried out as pain shot through him.

  “Now,” she said, stepping back and gesturing to the men in scrubs. A cruel smile curved her lips as one of the men picked up a small, vice-like instrument with rows of serrated teeth. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

  * * *

  Harley didn’t know how long they tortured him. It could have been days, weeks, even years, though part of his mind logically knew that he’d probably only been in that place for a few hours since even evil masterminds needed to eat and sleep. But time and space and thought had all melted away under the onslaught of torture, and his mind had been filled only with pain.

  They’d sliced and diced him with a variety of instruments – shallow cuts, deep cuts, short and long slices – made of both silver as well as other metals. Amelia had oohed and ahhed as she’d examined the wounds, making copious notes on a clipboard as to how much damage each implement had done, and how long it took him to heal each wound. Every time his inner beast took over and he tried to shift, they injected him with a small dose of silver-laced barbiturates to force the beast to retreat, and Amelia made notes of each time that occurred as well.

  “I do wish you would stop that,” she’d said irritably after the third time he’d done it. “Each time we inject you it affects the results of our experiment. We will have to repeat this one a second time.

  A second time? He’d thought, panic rising in his throat. He was going to have to through this again?

  Then again, maybe that wasn’t so bad. The next form of torture wasn’t likely to be any better, and in fact was probably going to be a lot worse. Maybe he should continue to try and muck up their attempts…

  Jesus Christ. You sound like a fucking five year old. The more you resist, the worse this shit is gonna get.

  Yeah, and unfortunately for him, resistance was built into his blood. He would not – could not – give in.

  Two burly guys dragged him from the room by his underarms, his toes scraping against the floor as he tried to keep up, but the silver had weakened him to the point that his muscles were like jelly, unable to hold his weight. It took all the strength he had just to lift his head and peer through his blood-drenched hair at the prison layout, which, as far as he could see, amounted to nothing more than row upon row of silver-enforced cells.

  A chill went through him as he realized this particular prison had been built specifically for his kind. The acrid stench of antiseptic and bleach coated the air, but he was willing to bet that beneath it all, if his nose was working properly, he would be able to catch the faintest scent of other shifters who had been here, as well as the odors associated with blood, sweat and death.

  After all, it was clear that was all that awaited him at this place, and likely what all the other prisoners had gone through.

  “Where… where are the others?” he asked, his voice strained.

  Harley’s ears rang as the guard on his right cuffed him. “No questions,” he barked as one of the other men slid open Harley’s cell door. They tossed him unceremoniously into the cell, and with no strength left at all, Harley collapsed against the cold, unforgiving concrete, unable to even make it to the too-small cot in the corner.

  The ce
ll door rattled shut behind him, followed by the ominous click of the lock sliding into place. “All your other beasty friends are dead,” the guard informed him snidely. “You’re the only resident of this fine establishment, and going by what happened to the others, you’re not likely to be here long. Probably a week, tops, if you’re lucky.” He laughed, and his buddies joined in until they were practically guffawing in the hall.

  Their raucous laughter lingered in the halls with Harley long after they’d gone, along with the palpable taste and scent of despair, and Harley wondered if he was ever going to walk out of this place alive.

  Chapter Four

  It turned out that the guard was wrong. Harley was still alive at the end of the first week. And the second. And the third. Every day the guards came to collect him for Amelia’s ‘experiments’, and every day she continued to torture him with various methods and devices.

  The first three days were more of the same, but on the fourth, Amelia had evidently tired of the whole slice-and-dice routine because she moved onto fire. Well, more accurately, heat. Metal rods, blowtorches, burning coal, and heated coils were applied to his body for various lengths of time. He’d even taken a certain fascination with watching his skin char, turning from flesh pink to a harsh black, as it curled away from his flesh. After all, he had to get some kind of enjoyment out of this whole thing, or what was the point? There was absolutely nothing she could do to him to break him, though she tried everything imaginable. She moved forward relentlessly, her eyes void of emotion, testing torture after torture on him, methodically cataloguing each of his weaknesses.

  The fire experiments only lasted two days, but she spent at least three on electrocution. She also seemed to have great fun stretching him on the rack, though unfortunately for her they had to ‘take a break’ because his spine took four days to heal after she’d broken it – another ‘wonderful’ discovery, by her standards.

  He wondered how long it would take for her to recover if he separated two of her vertebrae.

  “You know,” she told him conversationally one night, when they opened up a skylight in the window to see if the light of the full moon had any effect on him. It was one of his better days, as her assistants had yet to touch him with any kind of implement. “You’ve weathered all of this much better than any of your predecessors. I must say I’m quite impressed.”

  “That so.” His response was flat, his eyes fixed upon the skylight as he waited for the cloud to shift and reveal the moon. The luminescence of the full moon tended to bring his beast out in full strength, and though he doubted it would be enough for him to overcome her men, he still had to try.

  “Very much so.” Amelia’s eyes gleamed as she studied him. “You’re the seventh werewolf shifter we’ve had on this particular table. The others all changed under the light of the moon, becoming mindless, ravenous beasts that we eventually had to put down. I wonder if you’ll be the same.”

  Ah. So that explained the row of guards standing to his left with their rifles trained on him. He imagined that any shifter pumped with that many silver bullets would probably die relatively quickly. “That’s not going to be necessary with me.”

  Amelia lifted a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Oh? Are you more resistant than other wolves?”

  Harley clenched his jaw and turned away, not sure what to say. He didn’t want to give up the secrets of his brothers-in-arms, but at the same time he also wasn’t ready to throw in the towel and let her kill him.

  “You’ll soon find out,” he finally growled, and then the cloud drifted away and the light of the moon was fully upon him, bathing him in its wonderfully incandescent glow.

  A groan escaped his lips as his back arched, the change sweeping over him involuntarily as the moon’s magic pulled his beast to the forefront. Snarling, he fought to maintain a hold on his wolf, as his body stretched and changed, as muscle and bone and sinew reformed and rearranged, and hair, claws and teeth sprouted and lengthened.

  “Hold,” Amelia commanded in a hard voice, as he heard guns being cocked. His eyes were squeezed shut in agony, so he couldn’t see what she was doing, but he imagined she was standing between him and the men, her hand held up as a fierce expression crossed her face.

  “But ma’am, you should at least let us give him one dart,” one of the guards protested. “He’s going to be extremely unstable – ”

  “I said hold.”

  Blessed silence descended upon the room then, the only sound that of the men breathing, and Harley panted as his body went through the last vestiges of the shift. When it was done he lay on the table not as a man, but a wolf with a beautiful, sleek coat, dappled in silvery-white. His golden eyes stared up at the moon as he savored the lunar power coursing through him, power that chased away the lingering effects of the silver and strengthened him.

  He wished with all his might that he could leap up from this table right now and rip out the bitch’s throat, but something – an invisible force of some kind – weighed down on him as though it had a stranglehold on his beast. She hovered close to him now, within striking range as she studied him, her eyes lit up with intrigue, analyzing every inch of his face. Her perfect lips were parted, her cheeks flushed with pleasure as her dark eyes ran up and down his beast form, and wouldn’t you know it, the bitch actually dared to sink her hands into the soft fur at his abdomen.

  Next thing you knew, she was going to be rubbing his belly like he was a damned dog. He didn’t know if he was going to be able to stop from ripping her hand off if she did that, but he did bite back the growl that threatened to rumble from his chest at the contact from his enemy. His beast was poised and ready to kill, though he lacked the strength needed, which confused his beast, especially on the one night of the month when he should be stronger, and more alive than ever.

  “Well aren’t you gorgeous,” she murmured, running her fingers gently through his fur. “Total control,” she breathed, looking into his eyes. “None of the other werewolf shifters ever managed anything close to this. And you’re not even attempting to attack me, are you?”

  It wasn’t for lack of trying.

  His hackles started to rise at the cooing tone in her voice, and Harley forced himself to relax even though her syrupy praise made him want to sink his teeth into the perfect alabaster column of her neck. “I think it’s time to start the second phase of your training,” she murmured, and then straightened up and snapped her fingers. Someone pressed a button, and the metal plates in the ceiling slid shut, closing off the skylight to him.

  Immediately the beast inside him relaxed, and Harley forced himself through another change, shifting slowly back into human form.

  “Second phase?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Amelia smiled. “Yes, your second phase of the training. This is where I transform you into a proper soldier for my army. But only after you’re been completely and absolutely…broken.”

  Harley seethed inwardly as the guards hauled him from the table, but he kept his expression carefully blank.

  Amelia beamed at him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, wolf.”

  She never even noticed when he palmed a scalpel from the table on his way past.

  Chapter Five

  “Oh come on, Dad, you’re being absolutely ridiculous!” Jocelyne Fitsimmons complained, as she stepped out from the safety of her office building into the pouring rain. Juggling her umbrella in one hand and her cell phone in the other, she hurried down the street to the bus stop so she could catch a ride back to her little apartment in the village. “I’m not waiting around for one of your guys to come and pick me up. I’ve got way too much work to do, and I left my laptop at home.”

  “Sweetheart, you don’t understand,” her father, General Fitsimmons, was clearly trying for a pleading tone, but it came out more as a bark – which made her want to smile and simultaneously roll her eyes at the same time. Her father was always trying to order her around like one of his soldiers. “The situation is very
tense right now, and I don’t want to risk your safety.”

  “Tense how? Oh, dammit!” She cursed under her breath as the bus sailed by her, and broke into a run to try to catch the darn thing. Unfortunately, a twenty-eight thousand pound vehicle on eight wheels moved a lot faster than Jocelyne did on a pair of six-inch pumps, and since it was pouring rain out, the driver didn’t even see her trying to flag her down. It left her in its proverbial dust, splashing puddles onto her nylon-clad legs, which were woefully exposed to the elements in her pencil skirt.

  Good thing she had the umbrella, or her blonde hair would be a mass of limp noodles stuck to the sides of her head.

  “Sweetheart?” her father said anxiously. “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah,” she grumbled. “I just missed the bus, that’s all.”

  Her father let out a sight that was frustrated and relieved all at once. “Why don’t you just let Gerald pick you up,” he said. “He can have the car brought around to you in fifteen minutes. And maybe tomorrow, after you’re done with work, you and I can have dinner.”

  “Really?” Homework forgotten, Jocelyne smiled at the thought of having dinner with her father. He was always so busy with work, and it was rare for her to see him, even though there was absolutely no doubt that he loved her, and they’d always had a close relationship. “You sure?”

  “Yes, as long as you promise to go back inside and wait for Gerald.”

  “Deal.”

  “That’s my girl. I’ll send him around now. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  It occurred to her as she hung up the phone that she never really got an answer as to what this ‘tense situation’ was that was apparently so dangerous her father didn’t want her making the trek alone unaccompanied. Her thumb hovered over the call button on her phone as she wondered whether or not she should call him back and ask him, but then she shrugged and pocketed her phone. She would just ask him tomorrow when she saw him for dinner.